First Impressions On FreeSWITCH

The telephone is nothing new to most of us non-cave dwelling human beings. Its been around for as long as most people can remember and has even earned the legal right to be qualified as an essential service in most developed nations. The telephone revolutionized the communications industry, and with recent open-source project support of VoIP technologies; it shows no signs of letting up.

One of the most recent additions to the world of open-source telephony engines is FreeSWITCH. Originally envisioned as a stable, robust and high-powered switching engine, it has grown through its development to be just that and much more. Being one of the major players in the open-source telephony landscape, Asterisk has undergone extensive changes since its initial breakout in 1999. After several years, many developers in the Asterisk community tabled the notion of an Asterisk 2.0 system. A complete overhaul and re-coding of the Asterisk core was not a well received idea by the greater Asterisk development community and as result the idea was shelved. With a difference in vision, a small group of developers disengaged from Asterisk development to proceed with a “bottom-up” build of a brand new open-source telephony engine; eventually known as FreeSWITCH.

FreeSWITCH made its debut back in early 2007 and since then has been revised, currently to version 1.0.6. The most recent version is; by all accounts, one of the most reliable and powerful telephony switching engines available (open-source or not!). Of the many groups that are testing FreeSWITCH as a replacement for Asterisk (and other popular telephony engines), its most notable advantage is in its raw performance. Some have touted that a single FreeSWITCH box is capable of replacing a 10-box Asterisk cluster. With this sort of switching power, FreeSWITCH looks poised to assault the VoIP and switching stages.

The FreeSWITCH engine seemed to gain more and more popularity in 2009 as it moved out of its candidate versions and into official release versions. Although most that adopted the official release did note its exceptional power and stability, its biggest criticisms remain on the lack of a decent administration GUI and available documentation. Fast forward a year or so to today; the FreeSWITCH wiki now includes lots of information to assist in setup and configuration, system administrators and developers are posting tips and tricks for use-case issues, and administration GUIs are being developed (most notably FreePBX v3).

With its performance capabilities being tested to extremes and in real implementations, FreeSWITCH is impressing its users at every turn. Now with other development communities working on its user-ended shortcomings, the FreeSWITCH engine will is setting itself up to be a major player in telephony universe.

Related Links:

http://freeswitch.org

http://ostatic.com/blog/freeswitch-poised-to-shake-up-the-open-source-voip-scene

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/greenfield/open-source-voip-asterisk-or-freeswitch/233

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